User talk:George Swan

George Swan

Current talk page

Archive 1

upgrade happening soon, new accounts allowed

Hi George! In response to your message, we certainly are accepting new accounts. Currently that request is made via a Google Docs form linked on the main page. However, since the wiki is on the verge of upgrading its software any day now (probably later this week, for sure), I recommend that you have him wait a few days, because the user interface is likely to look a bit different. And hopefully when we upgrade, account requests will also be easier and won't require us to use Google Docs at all. Our software is over ten years old at this point, so upgrading is important. Please bear with us as we make this transition. I am so glad to see you active in here again!Pat Palmer (talk) 15:15, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

• Thanks for the prompt followup. Cheers! George Swan (talk) 15:44, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

porting from Wikipedia

George, It is perfectly acceptable to port articles from Wikipedia and then work on them here. Be sure to mark the flag on the /Metadata page as coming from Wikipedia when you first bring them over. After a number of changes have been make, you can then undo that flag. It might be useful also to note on the Discussion page for the ported article that you brought it from Wikipedia on a certain date (and why, if you like--such as, that you wrote much of it anyway). That can be helpful for future reference.Pat Palmer (talk) 02:11, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

subpages not working yet

Hi George! Thanks for testing the new wiki. Thanks for your report in the forum. It is not currently possible to create articles with subpages; we're working on that. If we can't get it working, we'll find an alternative option for those who want it. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:41, 18 March 2022 (CDT)

• Thanks for getting back to me. George Swan (talk) 11:36, 18 March 2022 (CDT)

articles about living people known to the public

George, For any articles about living people who are in the public eye (as in politics or famous for any reason), we now need to add them explicitly to the Topic Informants workgroup. This has to be done, at present, manually by adding the appropriate directive at the bottom of the article, which would be: [[Category:Topic_Informant_Workgroup]]. Formerly, the metadata page took care of this. I added directives to the bottom of the Sara Moonves article, which you can look at as an example. For Sara Moonves, I also added [[Category:Journalism_Workgroup]]. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:08, 23 March 2022 (CDT)

• Okay...

Stephanie Mack - done

Laurie Sandell -done

Clayton Trivett - done

Nina de Gramont - done

Catherine Hooper - done

Finding new BLPs is trivial for the period between now and March 17th. I ported a dozen or more in early March. Do you have a suggestion on how to find them? George Swan (talk) 09:10, 23 March 2022 (CDT)

Pat - I found the following through the new pages special page. It seems to go back to 2022-02-27, with a few items from early this year, and late December. Were there only a few additions over those months? Is it only capable of showing the last 500 edits? George Swan (talk) 09:48, 23 March 2022 (CDT)

Kate Macdonald Butler - done

Kate Armstrong (memoirist) - done

Rochus Lokinap - done

Leo Nuia - done

Robert Porter - done

Nick Luna - done

Park Eun-Mi - done

Peter Gornstein - done

E.J. White - done

Jeremy Boxen - done

Rachel Ricketts - done

Wayne Clarkson - done

Maxine bailey - done

The Metadata subpages still work. You just need to add 'Topic Informant' to one of the 'cat' entries at e.g. Template:Laurie Sandell/Metadata and it will display Category:Topic Informant Workgroup on the article. We don't generally add categories to the article itself. John Stephenson (talk) 09:45, 23 March 2022 (CDT)

• Okay, I manually added Topic Informant here as cat4. Are four cats allowed? George Swan (talk) 10:03, 23 March 2022 (CDT)

Three is the maximum, so in that case you would have to add [[Category:Topic Informant Workgroup]] to the article itself. John Stephenson (talk) 10:07, 23 March 2022 (CDT)

1. Template:Stephanie Mack/Metadata
2. Template:Laurie Sandell/Metadata
3. Template:Clayton Trivett/Metadata
4. Template:Nina de Gramont/Metadata
5. Template:Catherine Hooper/Metadata
6. Template:Kate Macdonald Butler/Metadata
7. Template:Kate Armstrong (memoirist)/Metadata
8. Template:Rochus Lokinap/Metadata
9. Template:Leo Nuia/Metadata
10. Template:Robert Porter/Metadata
11. Template:Nick Luna/Metadata
12. Template:Park Eun-Mi/Metadata
13. Template:Peter Gornstein/Metadata
14. Template:E.J. White/Metadata
15. Template:Jeremy Boxen/Metadata
16. Template:Rachel Ricketts/Metadata
17. Template:Wayne Clarkson/Metadata
18. Template:Maxine bailey/Metadata

workgroup designation

George, the correct way to add an article that has subpages to a workgroup is via the metadata page. And note, do NOT add the word Workgroup in the metadata page; there, you only need Topic Informant. But with the category directly on the main article, you need [[Category:Topic_Informant_Workgroup]]. Open up the editor for some existing articles and look how this is done. If there are no subpages on an article yet, then please continue to use the [[Category:Topic Informant]] kind of code at the bottom of the page. Topic Information is a workgroup, just like Mathematics is a workgroup. To see if it's done correctly, look at the bottom of the main article and see if the link to the workgroup is working. Thanks! Pat Palmer (talk) 12:37, 25 March 2022 (CDT)

• Okay. Thanks. George Swan (talk) 13:16, 25 March 2022 (CDT)

adding links to articles

George, I love that you are adding links to your articles. Well done! To make them more accurate, there are two methods. The old way was first to search on the term and then go copy the exact spelling of the article name. The new method is to let the "Popup" extension show you article names. Just type [[term, and the popup feature will offer to complete the link for you. That way, you'll get more accuracy. And the last step, or course, is to look at the linked word after the Edit is complete to make sure it works. Thanks a bunch. I mention this because in looking at your articles, I found several links that did not reach a real article, where just a tweak of spelling would get the link right. These things are case sensitive. Pat Palmer (talk) 12:40, 25 March 2022 (CDT)

• thanks! George Swan (talk) 13:17, 25 March 2022 (CDT)

about subpages

George, I benefited from your comments on the instructions for how to create subpages clusters. Just want you to note, however, that it is normally NOT acceptable to go and comment on anything in a user's sandbox unless you have been invited by that user to do so. I had invited John S, and I guess you saw it in the Recent Changes and just jumped in. In this case, it was helpful, but people might not like it unless you ask them first. In fact, technically, it's bad form even to LOOK at what's in a user's sandbox unless they tell you to. Of course, being a wiki, we can always peek anyway, but maybe don't let them know you did! Sandboxes are not collaborative areas except by special invitation :-) Now that the house training is done with, let me reply to the questions you posted about subpages today.

You wrote, "People who can't figure this out - we want them to feel okay about not using subpages, correct?" And the answer is, not exactly. Citizendium still has a policy of requiring the use of subpages on major articles (beyond stubs that were just created). We actually kicked a person out last year because he was going around undoing subpages article clusters because he didn't like them. But you're right that not everyone can be expected to learn this cumbersome manual process, in which case they will need to ask for help in getting it done for them. We'll try to get it automated at some point in the future. I'm working on it. And yes, the old form that automated filling out the metadata page is too old to work. The original extension was in PHP (version 5) and we're now on PHP 7 (which is not at all friendly to code written with PHP 5 in mind), and many other things has changed as well. I'm impressed that you've figured out how to do it. I worked in this wiki for many years with no understanding of how subpages worked, nor did I really like them. But now, I've grown used to them and for consistency, I hope we can stick with them for the long haul.Pat Palmer (talk) 15:36, 31 March 2022 (CDT)

• Thanks for the heads-up. George Swan (talk) 17:26, 31 March 2022 (CDT)

there is a template for archiving User Discussion pages easily

Hey George, I just found the {{Archive box|auto=long}} template. If you name the archive subpages like this: User:George_Swan/Archive 1 (and just change the digit at the end for additional archives), then put the template in the top of your User Discussion page as well as the archive, it will establish links back and forth from the Discussion page to all the archives. I just moved and converted mine to use this. I found the instructions here. Pat Palmer (talk) 16:07, 31 March 2022 (CDT)

images MUST have license information (and copyright holder, if applicable)

George, Every image uploaded to Citizendium must clearly have permissions. Lacking staff, we have been lax about enforcement, but it's important and images without correct licensing are subject to removal. The license must either be in the public domain (with one of the PD licenses from MediaWiki:Licenses shown in curly braces underneath the "Licensing" section) or we must have permission from the copyright holder, usually via an email copied to a subpage of the File: page. So just for example, this image File:Rainbow_in_Prince_Rupert_Harbour.jpg shows neither a copyright holder (who is presumably the person who made the photo) nor a license. Below is an example of how a File: page should be formatted:

== Summary ==
{{Image_Details
|description = The Laughing Philosopher: American poet Walt Whitman (1819–92)
|author = George C. Cox
|copyright = Public domain
|source = http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Walt_Whitman_edit_2.jpg&oldid=35604620&uselang=nl
|date-created = 1887
|pub-country = US
|notes = This image was made in 1887 in New York, by photographer George C. Cox. The image is said to have been Whitman's favorite from the photo-session; Cox published about seven images for Whitman, who so admired this image that he even sent a copy to the poet Tennyson in England. Whitman sold the other copies
|versions =
}}

== Licensing ==
{{PD}}

Also, look on the Forum technical page to see how to get the old description from the new server by looking in history. I would appreciate your help fixing up images that lack licensing. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:38, 20 April 2022 (CDT)

• I used {{Image notes flickr2}}, which I think stated the license... That template seems to have been deprecated, and when the image information was ported to {{Image_Details}} the license information seems to have been left behind.

I seem to have uploaded about 300 images on the old server. I'll have to go over them a second time to see which ones lost the license info I supplied when it was first uploaded. George Swan (talk) 22:51, 22 April 2022 (CDT)

capitalization of article names

George, I moved the "Maxine bailey" article to "Maxine Bailey". By convention, proper names are both capitalized. So the name of an article about a TV shows would be, for example, "Red Dwarf", whereas the name of an article about a star less massive and dimmer than the sun would be capitalized like this: "Red dwarf". Pat Palmer (talk) 08:47, 17 May 2022 (CDT)

• Pat Palmer, I noted, on Talk:Maxine Bailey#No capitals, that bailey has chosen to flout the capital letter name convention. Newspapers seem prepared to honour her wishes, when referring to her.

If our conventions require ignoring her choice, should there at least be redirects, so search engine efforts that use what she regards as the correct spelling, find her article? George Swan (talk) 23:05, 17 May 2022 (CDT)

I may delete this stub article; do you have plans for it?

George, I propose to delete Nikolas Cruz, which is a mere stub unlinked to anything else, and which reflects news stories readily available in search engines. Do you have further plans for this article? If not, I would like to delete it. For one thing, I don't think the names of these mass killers ought to be publicized. Anyway, asking before I zap it. Please let me know your thoughts.Pat Palmer (talk) 06:12, 5 June 2022 (CDT)

We could, of course, attempt to write about mass shootings generally. But I know in advance that this would be a frought topic and would require lots of work to get it balanced. So personally, I am not particularly interested in starting that right now. If someone else wants to and can bring enough objective evidence, I'd allow it--in which case, an article about this guy (who's about to go on trial after four years) could be useful. Pat Palmer (talk) 06:20, 5 June 2022 (CDT)

• I did have plans. I marked it with __NOINDEX__, because it is potentially controversial. Nevertheless, I consider it a topic worthy of expansion. Shortly after the shooting the wikipedia process concluded it should be a redirect to the aticle on the shooting. A similar conclusion to that reached for Steven Dale Green.

The reasoning there, such as it was, was that they were known "for only one event". I argued, in Green's case, that (1) he was known for more than the Iraqi rape-killing; (2) he was the target of considerable coverage in reliable sources that was devoted to him, personally, not the rape-killing. A well-known playwright wrote a play about him. Scholarly articles talked about him. He was seen as the poster child demonstrating the foolhardiness of the Bush administration to drop its standards for who was qualified to enlist and go through basic training. Green had a criminal record, and an IQ low enough he would not normally have qualified.

I haven't looked into Cruz's background, as much, and there have been less time for scholars to focus on him, but he too seems to be an individual scholars will write about over and above the shooting.

I'll tell you what. I'll set myself a reminder. If you agree not to delete it now, and time goes by and I don't add those references and expand it, I'll come back and ask you to delete it. Will three months be an okay time frame?

One of my most influential lessons came from a panel I attended, when I was a young man, about forty years ago. I thought this one speaker, a historian, would end up being boring. The first minute or two of his talk seemed to confirm that. But he played a trick.

He started off by saying there was huge holes in what historians knew. Why? Because so much of what goes on in people's lives, moment to moment, they consider "beneath hotice". IIRC he offered, as an example, the question did the average peasant, of 1000 years ago, get to travel? Or was the farthest they ever got from the hut where they were born, was a ten km to the nearest market town.

He said he and his team could help provide some answers to these questions, after they had examined a series of documents that had eeen archived, for one cluster of villages, in France, for a decade or so. There had been a problem in that cluster of villages. So, the authorities had done more or less what we would do today. They sent a commission, kind of like a Royal Commission, "but with rather greater coercive powers".

In fact, they sent the Inquisition. Inquisition interrogators had grilled the surviving villagers, sometimes using actual torture, when scaring the bejebus out of them didn't seem enough. And scribes were sitting there, writing everything down.

This lecture has strongly covered my choice of what topics merit articles, and what are worthy topics for photography. I started about a dozen articles, over on the wikipedia, on early Canadian photographers. In general, no one paid much attention to these guys, at the time they took their photos, but, to the people interested in such things, their work is highly celebrated, or at least highly republished. I didn't start the wikipedia article on Arthur Goss, Toronto's first official photographer. But I contributed to it. People celebrate his monumental photographs. What is less celebrated are the thousands of photographs he took documenting urban poverty.

Another of those fine photographers is known for his thousands of surviving photos. The heartbreaking thing is that when he was old, or shortly after his death, most of his negatives, presumably of equally valuable images, were lost. I can't remember if he donated them, after he retired. But old fashioned negatives were bulky, heavy, and difficult to store, because the negative was an emultion on a glass plate. Someone made the decision that his old images had lost their value, but the glass plates they were on could have the emultions washed off, and could be re-used for new negatives. George Swan (talk) 01:19, 6 June 2022 (CDT)

• Pat, following my reply, above, I ported Steven Dale Green. The automatic generation of an article's Metadata, used to ask if it was being ported from wikipedia. Although I did make a big update to it, when I re-instated it years after it was first deleted. But over half of it is the work of other wikipedians.

I can't figure out how we mark it as such.George Swan (talk) 01:38, 6 June 2022 (CDT)

Change the metadata status to a normal one and use {{WPAttribution}}; see an example with elaboration at Molten salt reactor. Let's see how this goes; I won't delete for now. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:44, 6 June 2022 (CDT)

• Pat, change the status like this? George Swan (talk) 09:18, 6 June 2022 (CDT)``

Not quite! But I fixed it for you this time. NEVER put anything extra on the Metadata page. All I did was change the status of the Metadata page to 2 ("developing), and then to the main article, I added the WPattribution template at the top.Pat Palmer (talk) 14:30, 6 June 2022 (CDT)

Im my opinion, to make these two articles "keepers", there needs to be a clear statement near the beginning of the article about why these men's cases are of interest. In general, it is not deemed a good idea to write about murderers and mass killers' lives, but it seems that the legal wrangling in both instances is worthy of interest, and so the article would do well to make clear why the information about these cases may be of abiding interest. It means a little more than just "stating the facts" (he killed XYZ and was convicted). I'll try to help you with this, but I need to learn more about the cases myself first. Or you can give it a try.Pat Palmer (talk) 14:34, 6 June 2022 (CDT)

Let's create a list of all the fireboat articles

George, I notice your interest in creating articles about fireboats. Nice! Let's create a list of all these articles here: Fireboat/Related_Articles. And also, let's figure out a naming convention for these articles. I notice that one starts with the word Fireboat, but the others do not. Some have (fireboat) after the names; I like that option. I will work on renaming the existing articles to have (fireboat) after the name if that is okay with you. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:31, 10 July 2022 (CDT)

Naming convention for Fireboat articles

George, I am seeing quite a few of the new articles about Fireboats which do not have (firewall) at the end of the name; an example is Deanna_Jo. Could we please use the suffix on all the articles? If they are not ONLY fireboats, then use (boat), because most of them are named for people, making it possible or likely there could be need for disambiguation some day. I am not sure if you can rename the existing articles yourself (I may have to do it), but could you please stick with this naming convention going forwards? Or let me know what standard you are using to decide so that I'll understand. And P. S. --the main article is now Fireboat (singular), with the plural article redirected to the singular one. And I deleted the /Definition for the plural one so we won't have duplicate, competing /Definition pages out there. Also, the links are case sensitive. So for any new links to fireboat, you might need sometimes to use [[Fireboat|fireboat]]. If necessary later, we can add redirects from the lower case versions, both singular and plural, to make all the links work, but a better thing would be to make the links as accurate as we can. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:15, 14 July 2022 (CDT)

P S - I am liking the work you are doing, so please don't take this as any sign of displeasure. I find many of the articles that are not just stubs to be quite interesting. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:46, 14 July 2022 (CDT)

• Pat Palmer... Rename all articles about fireboats so (fireboat) is a suffix in all names? Sure. I can do that. It should work for almost all articles, except Geyser (fireboat, 1886) and Geyser (fireboat, 1889). I'll leave those as is.

Cheers! George Swan (talk) 11:17, 14 July 2022 (CDT)

ATTENTION! you are creating flawed metadata pages

George, Please look at Bright_Leaf_(disambiguation) and you will see that the rpl template is not displaying properly for two of the articles (there is no icon showing article status). This is because you have adding spaces (and have perhaps other formatting flaws) in the Metadata page for those articles. Please look at the first two articles that display properly and use their Metadata page as your example. Do not add any spaces and do not add the other stuff at the top. I will leave it to you to correct the metadata on those two pages. Thanks! Pat Palmer (talk) 10:19, 1 September 2022 (CDT)

George, PLEASE STOP CREATING NEW PAGES until you obtain a good example of the Metadata page. The ones you have been creating do not work with the "rpl" template. I have corrected this article: https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Alpha_II_(fireboat,_1900) and it has a good Metadata page. I don't know exactly why your others are failing, but please copy and paste from this good one until further notice. Do not change anything, not even adding a blank line, except the title and workgroup names. If you do not stop creating articles with Metadata that is incorrect, I will be seriously displeased. Maybe you didn't see my notice yesterday, but today is your last warning lest we have to suspend your account temporarily until you get the word. I appreciate the work you are doing, but you are also introducing errors that proliferate across the wiki. Please stop! Pat Palmer (talk) 08:36, 2 September 2022 (CDT)

If for example you look at this list: https://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Fireboat/Related_Articles, note all the articles that EXIST (are not red links) but lack the yellow/white icon to their left. All of those have some kind of error in the /Metadata page. We should correct all of these before you create any new articles. I know it's not going to be fun, and I'm willing to help. I've allowed you to create new articles on your own (and was grateful for it) but now that we've found this problem, we need to correct it before creating any more new articles. The only way to see that problem, right now, is to look at the link to an article created by the "rpl" template as on /Related_Articles subpages. But those same links are also used on disambiguation pages, which is why I noticed the problem in the first place.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:52, 2 September 2022 (CDT)

The yellow/white icon in the rpl template indicates the status of the article, so one can easily see which are stubs, which are developing, and which are developed. Most new articles (unless mature and copied from elsewhere) will be stubs, status = 3. Pat Palmer (talk) 08:58, 2 September 2022 (CDT)

• No, I didn't see your notice of 2022-09-01 until just now.

I know Metadata pages need a <noinclude>{{subpages}}</noinclude>. A lot of existing pages have that at the bottom. When creating these pages - i've created over one hundred in recent months, I paged down to the bottom. They are long. Added the <noinclude>{{subpages}}</noinclude>. Then paged up to the top, to add the other stuff. A few days ago I started putting the <noinclude>{{subpages}}</noinclude> before the initial {{#switch: {{{info}}}

Is that what I did that broke things? No, it never occurred to me that this could be a problem.

That saved about 30 seconds per page, but, it was clearly a mistake, if it silently broke things.

I have never seen the name of this internal language mentioned. What is it called, and where is it documented?

Cheers! George Swan (talk) 12:56, 2 September 2022 (CDT)

I have to go out right now, but I will review all the metadata pages I created sometime in the next 48 hours...

• A couple of weeks ago I started creating the /Related Articles or /Definition subpages first. When instantiated they offer a link to create metadata, which does bring up a mostly complete empty metadata skeleton ... except it is missing that essential <noinclude>{{subpages}}</noinclude>. I don't know where they get that skeleton, or why that part is missing. George Swan (talk) 13:03, 2 September 2022 (CDT)